His Woodness

James Wood is everywhere, even on my frigging fiction shelf. The man anointed his holy critic on high for the moribund art of highbrow literature does his New Yorker work, publishes deconstruction manuals on how fiction works, and receives polite blow jobs from almost everyone who mentions his name in print. The repressed jealousy of failed academics in rent-controlled flats must be straining at the superego’s bit. I thought I’d check out his one novel to see how it illustrates his instructions for producing great fiction, but I got sidetracked by the unreliable narrator’s ongoing feud with his father and the lord. The Book Against God does the irony thick, as our protagonist is a first-rate jackass who can’t finish his Ph.D, tell his wife the truth or make her pregnant, or bathe. And yet, he delivers the atheist’s case against his beloved (at least by everyone else) father, a man who delights all in his company and is quick with the turned phrase. How can you root for the shitheel against the saint? Well, unfortunately, the theodicy discussions are pretty thin, as Wood did a far better job on Job in viciously slamming Bart Ehrman’s new book. We get inside Tom’s head for his grievances against his earthly and divine fathers, but the greatest potential to explore the theological questions in any depth comes in several conversations that are truncated by events. I wish he had gone deeper. There is little plot, so as a novel of ideas we’re left with character, and Wood simply does not unravel Tom as masterfully as Ford does in The Good Soldier, which must be a model for this work. I enjoyed the delicate humor and a few of the minor characters (especially one scholar who chafes at the time waste of human contact), but the debate isn’t rich enough, the story doesn’t exist, and our narrator entirely lacks charm. Read the essays instead.

A star is born pt II

I submit to you jaded hipster....J Reatard is to the the 2000s what J Mascis was to the late 1980s. In fact, in this humble reporter's opinion J's superstar appeal is perhaps only eclipsed by Tim Lincecum. These are your heroes today.

CAL WINS! Tree people shit out of luck!

07-22) 20:44 PDT Berkeley -- An Alameda County judge gave UC Berkeley the go-ahead on Tuesday to clear dozens of trees next to Memorial Stadium and build a proposed athlete training center, a crucial victory for Cal in a protracted battle marked by a widely publicized protest by tree-sitters that began in December 2006.

Thank you, Brian Sabean!

For once I'd like to thank Brian Sabean. Ray Durham is gone and if rumors mean anything, it appears Rich Aurillia and/or Omar will be out of here as well. I will try to stay focused on these deeply positive developments as the worst signing in baseball history pitches tonight, the $126M Barry Zito.

I drank more Old Styles and consumed more hot dogs in 3 days than in a normal year. Oh, and the Giants stink.

Apparently, it was the greatest match ever played, but...

Loudmouth alcoholic ex-pat

Nietzsche claimed that 19th century Euros no longer truly believed in the Christian god of the bible, and that pious churchmen were doing nothing more than maintaining social convention. After all, if one genuinely believed in an omniscient deity who heard your prayers and read your mind and determined your everlasting fate, you’d think that might dominate your mind every waking moment. Nietzsche looked around and saw otherwise. “God is dead” he pronounced- not that he had killed God, as Berkeley t-shirts would have you believe, but that the faithful had killed him by failing to believe in him anymore. With the moral authority of God gone, Nietzsche prophesized, all hell would break loose until that ethical vacuum was filled.

Well, you can spin that story a number of ways if you look at the 20th century. Some argue that two world wars were a direct byproduct of that loss of belief. Others make Nietzsche a proto-Nazi and part of the problem. I’d blame his sis for that misconception, but that’s another story. When one looks around the continent today, the death of god is everywhere. Secular humanism is the new religion, unless you count football. The pope pontificates and the children of Luther and Calvin self-flagellate, but most churches lie idle on Sunday. In America, of course, faith is a tougher beast to slay, but that hasn’t kept a new crew of provocateurs from trying. Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great have very different strategies, but each is a mostly polemical attack on religious belief (really, they’re calling these guys “the four horsemen of atheism”).

Having finished the first four, I just tackled Hitchens, and it is easily the most entertaining of the neo-atheist works, as he is the best stylist and the funniest. His approach is to tell story after story to mount evidence upon evidence against the folly of belief. It’s an entertaining ride, but I humbly submit that no thunderbolts struck the three faithful readers who picked this up. These guys will change no minds, but their exposure might make it more comfortable for skeptics to come out of the closet. Of course they’re preaching to the choir, but the success of these authors bolster and broaden the ranks of that chorus. That a loudmouth alcoholic ex-pat like Hitchens can write a hate screed against God and make it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list speaks volumes about the number of voiceless doubters desperate to hear their views spoken publicly. It will be a long time before an atheist gets elected to any national office, but the success of these books suggests a need for rhetoric beyond “God Bless the United States of America.” I ain’t saying the reincarnation of Emma Goldman is going to be the next governor of Texas, but fewer folks are thumping bibles in the shadows than pollsters would have us think.